The Segelberg Lecture Series explores the intersection of religious faith and public policy. This book contains the lectures of the Trust's fi rst series, which were focused on The Ends of Life. Dalhousie University's School of Public Administration managed the series through a lecture committee under the able leadership of the former Dean of Dalhousie Law School, Professor Innis Christie, Q.C.

Louise Till, mother of two, has inherited her father's hardware store after her parents' unexpected deaths. She begins to cut copies of her customers' keys for herself, each one a talisman against grief and the terrible guilt she feels at not having realized that her parents were desperately unhappy. Louise could use the keys, but she doesn't. Not until her life is overturned, again, when her marriage falls apart. Lou gives in to temptation, letting herself into Euphemia Rosenbaum's home. What follows is a tale of blackmail, break-ins, an unsolved mystery, and more secrets than Lou ever wanted to know. Lou must confront not only the lives of her neighbors, but the unspoken truths of her family and the doors within herself for which there are no keys. Told over the course of one long winter, Unlocking is a poignant and penetrating exploration of grief, community, family, and the secrets we keep, even from ourselves.

Periods of transition are often symbolically associated with death, making the latter the paradigm of liminality. Yet, many volumes on death in the social sciences and humanities do not specifically address liminality. This book investigates these "ultimate ambiguities," assuming they can pose a threat to social relationships because of the disintegrating forces of death, but they are also crucial periods of creativity, change, and emergent aspects of social and religious life. Contributors explore death and liminality from an interdisciplinary perspective and present a global range of historical and contemporary case studies outlining emotional, cognitive, artistic, social, and political implications.

Forensic science provides information and data behind the circumstances of a particular death, but it is culture that provides death with meaning. With this in mind, Rite, Flesh, and Stone proposes cultural matters of death as its structuring principle, operating as frames of the expression of mortality within a distinct set of coordinates. The chapters offer original approaches to how human remains are handled in the embodied rituals and social performances of contemporary funeral rites of all kinds; furthermore, they explore how dying flesh and corpses are processed by means of biopolitical technologies and the ethics of (self-)care, and how the vibrant and breathing materiality of the living is transformed into stone and analogous kinds of tangible, empirical presence that engender new cartographies of memory. Each coming from a specific disciplinary perspective, authors in this volume problematize conventional ideas about the place of death in contemporary Western societies and cultures using Spain as a case study. Materials analyzed here-ranging from cinematic and literary fictions, to historical archives and anthropological and ethnographic sources-make explicit a dynamic scenario where actors embody a variety of positions towards death and dying, the political production of mortality, and the commemoration of the dead. Ultimately, the goal of this volume is to chart the complex network in which the disenchantment of death and its reenchantment coexist, and biopolitical control over secularized bodies overlaps with new avatars of the religious and non-theistic desires for memorialization and transcendence.

lluminated by a profound yet humorous vision, Lifting the Taboo explores the specific relationship women of many colors, cultures, ages, and sexual orientations have to their own deaths, their attitudes towards loss, and their disposition to their role as primary care-givers to the dying.

Specifically, the book weighs the implications of breast cancer and examines in detail Alzheimer's Disease which, contrary to popular myth, can in several significant ways be perceived as a women's disease. Investigating mothers' responses to children's deaths, Sally Cline establishes that women's relationships to death are intricately connected to the experience of giving birth. They are, she argues, therefore psychologically and emotionally different from those of men. Cline goes on to examine women's roles and responses to AIDS and suicide, women's sexual relationships while dying, how society views widows as leftover lives, and women's radical work in hospices and death therapy, as well as their roles as female funeral directors.

Suicide among African Americans occurs at about half the rate with which it occurs among white Americans. Why is the black rate of suicide so much lower, particularly when one considers the effects of racism and other socio-economic factors on African Americans? One answer that has been offered is that churches within the African-American community have a greater influence than among white Americans and that they provide amelioration of social forces that would otherwise lead to suicide. To date no other book has provided an in-depth ethnographic study of the buffering effect of the black church against suicide. Findings from Early's study indicate that there is a consensus within the black community in terms of its attitudes and beliefs toward suicide. Early concludes that suicide is alien to underlying African-American belief systems and a complete denial of what it means to be black. This important study will be invaluable to sociologists and others studying contemporary race relations and social problems.

A practical overview of clinical issues related to end-of-life care, including grief and bereavement

The needs of individuals with life-limiting or terminal illness and those caring for them are well documented. However, meeting these needs can be challenging, particularly in the absence of a well-established evidence base about how best to help. In this informative guide, editors Sara Qualls and Julia Kasl-Godley have brought together a notable team of international contributors to produce a clear structure offering mental health professionals a framework for developing the competencies needed to work with end-of-life care issues, challenges, concerns, and opportunities.

Part of the "Wiley Series in Clinical Geropsychology, " this thorough and up-to-date guide answers complex questions often asked by patients, their families and caregivers, and helping professionals as well, including:

How does dying occur, and how does it vary across illnesses?

What are the spiritual issues that are visible in end-of-life care?

How are families engaged in end-of-life care, and what services and support can mental health clinicians provide them?

How should providers address mental disorders that appear at the end of life?

What are the tools and strategies involved in advanced care planning, and how do they play out during end-of-life care?

Sensitively addressing the issues that arise in the clinical care of the actively dying, this timely book is filled with clinical illustrations, guidance, tips for practice, and encouragement. Written to equip mental health professionals with the information they need to guide families and others caring for the needs of individuals with life-threatening and terminal illnesses, "End-of-Life Issues, Grief, and Bereavement" presents a rich resource for caregivers for the psychological, sociocultural, interpersonal, and spiritual aspects of care at the end of life.

Also in the "Wiley Series in Clinical Geropsychology""Psychotherapy for Depression in Older Adults""Changes in Decision-Making Capacity in Older Adults: Assessment and Intervention""Aging Families and Caregiving"

'This book may on first glance appear to be about death and regrets, but is in reality about life and choices. It is warmly life-affirming ... A magnificent read that will inspire. I loved it' Sue Black 'So beautiful ... Perfectly written and judged ... A wonderful book that made me grasp life a little more firmly' Dr Chris van Tulleken A powerful, moving and hopeful book exploring what people regret most when they are dying and how this can help us lead a better life. If you were told you were going to die tomorrow, what would you regret? Ten years ago, without time to think or prepare, Georgina Scull ruptured internally. The doctors told her she could have died and, as Georgina recovered, she began to consider the life she had led and what she would have left behind. Paralysed by a fear of wasting what seemed like precious time but also fully ready to learn how to spend her second chance, Georgina set out to meet others who had faced their own mortality or had the end in sight.

Sociologists have debated suicide since the early days of the discipline. This book assesses that body of work and breaks new ground through a qualitatively-driven, mixed method 'sociological autopsy' of one hundred suicides that explores what can be known about suicidal lives.

Zopf provides a comprehensive account of the biological components of mortality, its various forms and causes, and its many differentials. The study considers mortality among a range of populations, according to differentials such as age, gender, race, ethnic origin, socioeconomic and marital status, and urban or non-urban residence. It also traces changes in the impact of degenerative afflictions, infectious and parasitic diseases, and environmental factors. The result is a current and comprehensive treatment of changes in mortality and its causes in the United States. The many graphs and tables present succinct and clear evidence of current mortality trends, and the extensive bibliography adds to the usefulness of this work as a research tool. The text begins with an introductory overview of the components of mortality and the methods of measuring it. The following chapter analyzes mortality within the general population according to specific differentials. The study then treats patterns, trends, and causes of infant mortality. Zopf next considers the prevalence of several causes of death among different demographic groups, and he examines life expectancy for particular populations. A concluding chapter synthesizes the wealth of information contained within this work. Demographers, sociologists, and health professionals will find this volume a valuable addition to their libraries.

Dead women litter the visual landscape of the 2000s. In this book, Clarke Dillman explains the contextual environment from which these images have arisen, how the images relate to (and sometimes contradict) the narratives they help to constitute, and the cultural work that dead women perform in visual texts.

Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism traces the emergence of a fundamentally new way of writing about individual and collective mourning, demonstrating how a refusal of consolation and closure succeeds in promoting a progressive cultural politics crucial for reimaging gender, racial, and sexual subjects.

Public policy surrounding the hotly debated issue of physician-assisted suicide is examined in detail. You ll find an analysis of the current legal standing and practice of physician-assisted suicide in several countries. Authors discuss the ethical principles underlying its legal and professional regulation. Personal narratives provide important first-hand accounts from professionals who have been involved in end-of-life issues for many years.

Drawing upon a vast range of human experience and reflection, The Eternal Pity: Reflections on Dying demonstrates how people have tried to cope with the inevitability of death. Different cultures, informed by religious belief and sometimes desperate hope, teach people to respond to their own death and the death of others in modes as various as defiance, stoic resignation, and grief unbridled to the point of exhaustion. In addition to examples from literature, poetry, and religious texts, Father Richard John Neuhaus provides an intensely personal account of his encounter with death through emergency cancer surgery, and reflects on the changes that encounter has made in the way he lives.

While some contemporary writers have deplored the "denial of death" in our culture, The Eternal Pity shows how themes of death and dying are perennial and pervasive, although not always made entirely specific. Society may be viewed as a disorganized march of multitudes waving little banners of meaning in the face of the threat of non-being that is death. Some selections in this book reveal people utterly surprised by their mortality; others highlight how the whole of one's life can be a preparation for what used to be called "a good death." For some, life is a relentless effort to hold death at bay; for others, death is, although not welcomed, reflectively anticipated. Nothing so universally defines the human condition as the fact that we shall die. The Eternal Pity helps us to understand how the prospect of that final indignity compels a variety of decisions about how we might live.

This book presents the problem of attempted suicide as a meaningful and momentous event in the person's life with special consideration of its effects on the human environment. Five groups of people who have made suicide attempts were studied.

A burgeoning body of literature on death and dying is organized into a comprehensive, carefully outlined, annotated list in this volume, which cites more than 2200 books, articles, chapters, monographs, and reports primarily concerned with the counseling and theological aspects of death and dying. Compiled by a member of the clergy involved in hospice care, this bibliography recognizes the wide range of topics that comprise the human experience of death and dying, as it accesses information from the pastoral to the medical, the historical to the topical, and the philosophical to the technical elements of thanatology. This multidisciplinary approach provides helping professionals as well as those involved with mortuary science and the study of thanatology with an extensive guide to specific and general information. Introductory material both reviews the current trend towards specialization in thanatology and the need to preserve a holistic approach towards death and dying, and suggests uses for the sources cited in the pages that follow. The annotated entries are descriptive and critical, and are arranged to introduce the topic historically. They are followed by relevant theological and philosophical issues and conclude with works that address the care of the dying and bereaved. All the sources are fully indexed by author, title, and subject matter.

"[S]heds light not only on the obstacles to making motherhood safer, but to improving the health of poor populations in general."-Social Anthropology Since 1987, when the global community first recognized the high frequency of women in developing countries dying from pregnancy-related causes, little progress has been made to combat this problem. This study follows the global policies that have been implemented in Solola, Guatemala in order to decrease high rates of maternal mortality among indigenous Mayan women. The author examines the diverse meanings and understandings of motherhood, pregnancy, birth and birth-related death among the biomedical personnel, village women, their families, and midwives. These incongruous perspectives, in conjunction with the implementation of such policies, threaten to disenfranchise clients from their own cultural understandings of self. The author investigates how these policies need to meld with the everyday lives of these women, and how the failure to do so will lead to a failure to decrease maternal deaths globally. From the Introduction: An unspoken effect of reducing maternal mortality to a medical problem is that life and death become the only outcomes by which pregnancy and birth are understood. The specter of death looms large and limits our full exploration of either our attempts to curb maternal mortality, or the phenomenon itself. Certainly women's survival during childbirth is the ultimate measure of success of our efforts. Yet using pregnancy outcomes and biomedical attendance at birth as the primary feedback on global efforts to make pregnancy safer is misguided.

This fascinating work explores the meaning of death in the digital age, showing readers the new ways digital technology allows humans to approach, prepare for, and handle their ultimate destiny. With DeadSocial (TM) one can create messages to be published to social networks after death. Facebook's "If I Die" enables users to create a video or text message for posthumous publication. Twitter _LIVESON accounts will keep tweeting even after the user is gone. There is no doubt that the digital age has radically changed options related to death, dying, grieving, and remembering, allowing people to say goodbye in their own time and their own unique way. Drawing from a range of academic perspectives, this book is the only serious study to focus on the ways in which death, dying, and memorialization appear in and are influenced by digital technology. The work investigates phenomena, devices, and audiences as they affect mortality, remembrances, grieving, posthumous existence, and afterlife experience. It examines the markets to which the providers of such services are responding, and it analyzes the degree to which digital media is changing views and expectations related to death. Ultimately, the contributors seek to answer an even more important question: how digital existences affect both real-world perceptions of life's end and the way in which lives are actually lived. Explains how new technologies and online accessibility are changing human attitudes to death and dying-and impacting the ways in which people live Explores the afterlife experience as it can play out in a variety of digital media, including Facebook and other social media, World of Warcraft and video games, YouTube and other video services, and Internet memorials Analyzes the myriad ways encounters with death and dying and the capacity for mourning are mediated by new technologies Places death and dying in the digital age in historical perspective, showing how beliefs about and approaches to death and dying have changed constantly over time

Using a historical framework, this book offers not only the penal history of the death penalty in the states that have given women the death penalty, but it also retells the stories of the women who have been executed and those currently awaiting their fate on death row. This work takes a historical look at women and the death penalty in the United States from 1900 to 1998. It gives the reader a look at the penal codes in the various states regarding the death penalty and the personal stories of women who have been executed or who are currently on death row. As Americans continue to debate the enforcement of the death penalty, the issues of race and gender as they relate to the death penalty are also debated. This book offers a unique perspective to a recurring sociopolitical issue.